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“Traditional systems management solutions come with a very high operating burden -- simply learning to manage the infrastructure that manages your infrastructure is a daunting investment of both capital and time, often involving lengthy consulting engagements” said Adam Jacob, co-founder and chief product officer of Opscode. “Private Chef packages up all of Opscode’s operating expertise in running this critical business function and delivers this right into the enterprise data-center, in a highly available, custom built hardware appliance.”

Opscode’s Private Chef addresses enterprise data-center requirements, packaging together all of Opscode’s expertise in running large hosted automation platforms -- and delivering it as an appliance-based managed service behind the enterprise firewall. Private Chef helps enterprises:

Accelerate deployment and configuration management: OPC helps IT managers radically accelerate deployment and configuration management. This process delivers immediate business value rather than requiring IT managers to spend weeks figuring out how to make automation function.

Scale easily: OPC features a write-once-run-anywhere DNA that makes scalability simple. IT managers simply bring the server online -- from five to 50,000 servers in public or private clouds -- and Private Chef automatically makes the necessary updates.

Achieve immediate infrastructure awareness: With Opscode Private Chef, IT managers can dynamically query data within “recipes” to configure complex services such as discovering master MySQL servers, configuring Nagios, or finding all the memcached servers in a cluster. The necessary data is indexed and made searchable within OPC, allowing complex problems to be solved with simple, smart code.

Improve access and data encryption: Private Chef provides centrally controlled, role-based access and data encryption, which gives IT managers control over who can see information and when it’s available. In addition, Private Chef can be customized to meet the requirements of a specific security environment.

Opscode is part of a vibrant open-source community of more than 350 people and 75 different companies that are constantly improving Chef. IT managers can rest assured that if complex problems arise, the community is there to help solve them.

Private Chef can be used to create perfect clones of any environment: quality assurance, pre-production, partner-preview, and more. Once automated, enterprises retain a blueprint of the infrastructure, allowing it to build, or rebuild, automatically in minutes or hours -- not weeks of months.